The Rural Utilities Service (RUS) is part of his domain – it’s an agency within the federal agriculture department that, among other things, gives out loans and some grants to pay for broadband service upgrades and expansion in rural areas. California misses out on the most of that money, but it’s an important source of money for rural broadband projects in other states. For its latest round of broadband loans, RUS raised its minimum broadband service standard to 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds. If a community doesn’t have Internet access available at that level, then RUS considers it “unserved”.

There are a couple of potential explanations for why RUS is bucking the trend. The simplest is that the agriculture department’s wheels grind slowly and nobody at headquarters was paying much attention yet to technical changes already in the works for a relatively obscure program – Perdue has been on the job less than four months.

If those expectations have become reality, then Perdue likely isn’t worrying so much about pleasing big telephone and cable companies, or their amen corner on Trump’s policy team. His focus will be on making it easier for his friends and his natural ag industry constituency to tap federal subsidies. That might not be the most noble of motives for becoming a rural broadband champion, but it’s certainly a reliable one.